Folding@home is a distributed computing software project, running for almost 20 years, that utilises the donation of idle computing resources, such as gaming computers or consoles, to help support scientific research. Volunteers can install the programme onto their computer, which will run when the computer is not in use, for instance overnight. These collective resources are particularly valuable in running simulations of molecular interactions, which can accelerate drug discovery. Folding@home has recently started running workloads to support Covid-19 research.

To help contribute to this global effort, the NMS Computing Support team has deployed the software to a number of now idle student lab computers, and open-sourced the automation code of the machines to share with other sites looking to deploy the software to large numbers of Linux workstations.

Efforts are focused at identifying small molecules to inhibit or block the Spike Protein (S Protein) of the CoV-SARS-2 virus, which acts to bind the virus to healthy cells thus leading to infection.

All protein structures that are identified via the Folding@home simulations, and all of the associated data that results from the simulations, will be made available to the greater scientific community, so that further analysis and investigation can take place.

Researchers within NMS have also been invited to contribute any idle computing resources towards the wider pool, and the Computing Support team is further exploring how the capabilities of the Folding@home software can be run on other systems.

The unsurprisingly widespread uptake of Folding@home’s recent call for more resources towards coronavirus efforts has cumulatively resulted in generating over 470 petaFLOPS of compute power, making the system the world’s fastest computer – having twice the computing power than that of the IBM Summit super computer.

Dr Chris Lorenz, Department of Physics, commented,

Find out more about how King’s is helping the fight against coronavirus.